is sexually blank, queer, until adult fantasies are protected upon it. This queerness does not feature in many of the examples in this collection but is rather superseded by their anomalous state of otherness, the kind of monstrosity which is equally designated by adult society and similarly filled with its anxieties and, often transgressive, desires. Queer, as non-normative, is then an inherent part of the character of the abhuman child as are terms such as the abject, deviant, anomalous and even naughty as all of them describe a body that refuses to become adult, or even mature, under anything other than its own terms.
3. Anomalous Investigations
The chapters in this collection will be divided into four parts, with the middle two being two parts of a whole for reasons explained here. The division of the sections will largely follow the order established earlier with historical case studies at the beginning to set the stage for what is to follow. These precursors of the establishment of the category of childhood show societies trying to contain and control situations, and specifically ‘non-adults’, that they do not totally comprehend and so apply the default categories of their respective times. Consequently, this is rarely configured as simple bad behaviour or not following the rules as laid down by the adult population around them, although these features are inevitably involved, but are often explained through an association with dark, necessarily evil, forces. This creates an aura around all of them which sees them as equally vulnerable and contagious; a weak point open to the temptations of Satan and the supernatural but one that might also allow the evil to spread further and ‘infect’ others.25 Alongside this and as the occurrences that happened during the nineteenth century, there are attempts to temper such superstitious interpretations with more rational explanations, either via the law and legal judgement or the budding science of psychology and analysis. However, as described later, reason has similar recourse to stereotypical language of the dangerous, deranged or just plain ‘naughty’, who are equally monstrous and estranged from adult society. The first part, ‘Historical Case Studies’, consists of four chapters that cover this change from overly demonic interpretations to those that attempt to apply reason and science yet fall into very similar traps of monsterizing the child.
‘The Possession of John Starkie’ by Joyce Froome investigates the 1595 case of Nicholas Starkie and his children, John and Anne. Starkie was a wealthy man and when his children fell ill, he employed the services of Edmund Hartlay to help make them better. However, on spotting a way to ingratiate himself into the Starkie household, and make a considerable amount of money, Hartlay produced such conditions that Nicholas came to regard his son’s perfectly normal misbehaviour as something deeply sinister. At the heart of this matter is the purposely skewed interpretation of John’s behaviour, and rather than seeing it simply as a child ‘playing up’, it was given a far more ominous meaning – one which was in line with the anxieties of the society of the time. The 1590s were still a time of religious tension in England and had begun with the most notorious witch trial of the times – the ‘Witches of Warboys’. Here the 10-year-old daughter of Robert Throckmorton, the Squire of Warboys, accused the 76-year-old Alice Samuel of being a witch and causing the fits from which she suffered. In 1593, Alice and her family, a husband and daughter, were found guilty of witchcraft and were later hanged.26 The Starkie case plays directly into this rising fear of witchcraft, one that would see the passing of the Witchcraft Act in 1604. So rather than searching further for the real reasons for John and Anne’s anomalous behaviour, necromancy provided a more ‘obvious’ answer.
This is followed by Renaud Evrard’s ‘The Naughty Little Children: The Paranormal and Teenagers’ which shows how these same tropes work in the mid-nineteenth century and the ways in which societal development actually reinforces certain themes rather than diminishing them. The Victorian period was particularly ripe for cementing the bonds between children and the supernatural, as the author observes:
At the crossroads of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the emerging field of psychology developed critical tools to explain somnambulistic states, behavioural automatisms and double consciousness. Several psychopathologists relied on teenagers to demonstrate the mechanisms behind the occult and the dangers it represents.27
Evrard’s study deals with the case of Jeanne, a teenage girl from France, who was at the centre of a series of disturbances in a dwelling in the South of the country. The interpretations of the events that ensued are particularly interesting as they provide both scientific and paranormal explanations for the same phenomena. Jeanne was simultaneously seen as a hysteric, a gifted medium, the victim of an evil curse or a spoilt brat looking for attention. What they all have in common, of course, is that they portray the adolescent as something ‘other’ than normal; the levels of monstrosity involved might vary, but Jeanne is someone, or something, that needs to be controlled. Again, this shows how these various threads of the supernatural, cultural environment, science and medicine not only intersect at various points in time but become entangled so that the connections made at that nexus reverberate long after the original encounter.
Leo Ruickbie’s ‘I Was a Real Teenage Werewolf: The Seventeenth-Century Witchcraft Trial of Jean Grenier’ continues and develops the themes of cultural environment and individual agency. Jean Grenier was a teenage boy who confessed to being a werewolf and was subsequently imprisoned for life, actually a rather lenient sentence given the times. Convicted of witchcraft, murder and cannibalism, he can equally be seen, Ruickbie notes, as
a pubescent boy, mentally disabled, psychologically troubled, in a distressed condition, cast out from a broken home to fend for himself, with a difficult relationship with his father (to say the least), with unfulfilled romantic longings and a fantasy life that he could not distinguish from reality.28
Unusually, Grenier continually confessed his own guilt, but in so doing he took some measure of agency over the situation unfolding around him. Unfortunately, in taking control of the narrative that the society around him was writing, he can be seen to have lost any sense of what was real or fictitious, and therefore, only reinforced the trope of childhood monstrosity that was placed upon him. Equally interesting here is the fact that many of the accusations were made by other children, not unlike that seen in the Starkie case and the Witches of Warboys mentioned earlier. Children ‘outing’ other children as monsters is something that continues in many such occult events up to the present day. As noted by Ruickbie, ‘The case also bears comparison with child-led witchcraft accusations, such as at Salem, Massachusetts, and so-called survivor accounts of satanic cult involvement in the modern period.’29 This resonates with Kincaid’s idea of the child as a blank, and where different kinds of monstrosity can fill the ‘container’ of the ‘bad’ child.
The last chapter in this part, ‘Deviance on Display: The Feral and the Monstrous Child’ by Gerd H. Hövelmann, approaches the problems of categorization from a very different perspective – one that determines the exact nature of the child’s monstrosity. Of course, an integral part of determining how one type of monstrosity differs from another also inherently contains the criteria for how they are both unlike the ‘normal’ child, or as Hövelmann observes:
The following presentations and discussions focus on the kinds and extent of the respective abnormalities as compared with the ‘normal’, unobtrusive or average child and on the ways these children used to be presented to, and sometimes hidden from, an expectant public.30
The notion of ‘presentation’ here is one that picks up on Kincaid’s idea of the ‘horror show’ child which is ‘the object of our gaze […] given little to do but enact the same old roles for our pleasure: the monster or acknowledged victim’.31
